After finishing an eight-year Ukrainian school in Korolevo, Alexandr entered a Forestry College in Khust. He finished it with a red diploma [awarded to students having only excellent grades] and worked as chief of industrial shops in Khust. My younger son Vladimir, after finishing the Electrotechnical College, worked as a repairman of household appliances.
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Major events (political and historical)
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Displaying 46261 - 46290 of 50826 results
Mozes Katz
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My grandchildren know Jewish history, traditions and religion, everything a Jew should know.
When in the 1970s mass departures of Jews to Israel began I was eager to move there. Many of my relatives moved. My uncle Moishe, my father’s younger brother, who was in a concentration camp with me, and his family moved to the USA. He lives in Brooklyn.
My mother’s sister Rivka and her big family moved to the USA, too. They also live in Brooklyn. She has six daughters and two sons. She has about 70 grandchildren and great-grandchildren living there. Her daughters married religious Jews and had Jewish weddings and live according to Jewish rules.
My sister Ghitlia also moved abroad. Her husband died of a heart attack shortly before their departure. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Svaliava in accordance with all Jewish traditions and my sister, her son and daughter left for Israel. She lives in Rehovot. Her daughter got married in Israel and moved to the USA with her husband. Ghitlia’s son and his family live in Israel.
Of course, I didn’t want to stay here, but my wife and her family put an obstacle to our departure. They stated firmly that the USSR was their Motherland and that they didn’t want to move. Of course, I tried to convince my wife, but we happened to have stayed here.
My mother’s sister Rivka and her big family moved to the USA, too. They also live in Brooklyn. She has six daughters and two sons. She has about 70 grandchildren and great-grandchildren living there. Her daughters married religious Jews and had Jewish weddings and live according to Jewish rules.
My sister Ghitlia also moved abroad. Her husband died of a heart attack shortly before their departure. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Svaliava in accordance with all Jewish traditions and my sister, her son and daughter left for Israel. She lives in Rehovot. Her daughter got married in Israel and moved to the USA with her husband. Ghitlia’s son and his family live in Israel.
Of course, I didn’t want to stay here, but my wife and her family put an obstacle to our departure. They stated firmly that the USSR was their Motherland and that they didn’t want to move. Of course, I tried to convince my wife, but we happened to have stayed here.
When in the late 1980s perestroika 21 began I was skeptical about it like I would have been about any initiative of the Soviet power. Many promises – little doing. However, it turned out that I was wrong about it. There were notable changes. There came more freedom and people were not afraid of saying something wrong or in speaking to a wrong person. Persecutions of religious people stopped and people could go to church and openly celebrate religious holidays. The Jewish life has revived.
Gotterer Borbala Piroska
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Heaven forbid, I wasn’t involved in any sort of politics. However, my father was a member of the liberal party back then. He was in the liberal party, I remember that he voted when people had to vote. This was before World War II, between the two World Wars.
I didn’t spend a lot of time in Covasna during high school, I was there only during the vacations, on holidays and during summers; I didn’t come home every weekend. I stayed at home during vacations, I didn’t go anywhere. There was a big swimming pool in town, built by the owners of the carbonic acid factory, where I went and sunbathed, but not alone, I usually went with my father. My father usually went to take warm baths. The swimming pool still exists in Covasna today. I didn’t have many other interests outside the school. At home I had to learn to cook mostly, but I didn’t like it. I liked to clean the house, that’s what I did when I came home, to Covasna, I cleaned and my sister cooked, that’s how we divided the chores to help our mother. I wasn’t allowed to work out, but for all that, I had skates and I went to the skating ring and I had a racket and I played tennis, but not so often.
I studied piano in school with a teacher, she had students who wanted to learn. I still remember a few things, but I didn’t learn properly. I did study, but I didn’t like the teacher and I gave up learning to play the piano. I didn’t have other private lessons, I liked to act instead. I acted with my colleagues in my spare time. And I celebrated my birthday several times, I set up some play, I sang, I danced…I learnt to play something at the piano and invited the schoolmistress and the other teacher I liked, to come as there was a performance in that after noon. And they came, the schoolmistress brought her husband along, Mr. Ionel, who sometimes sent me to buy cigarettes, and they came. Back then I had pocket money and I bought some cake for each guest. I was 13-14 years old at the time.
Before World War II, I visited my high school colleagues. I had a very good colleague, a Hungarian from Ojdula, near Targu Secuiesc. Her father was a landlord, they were rich, very rich people, and they had a daughter, Olga, and I made friends with her: we stayed at the boarding school together and we made friends and she called me to spend the holiday with them. And I went to them and she came to my house. To this day, if we hear that one of us is in Ojdula, we send word.
I never had problems with my colleagues: I was a very good student, the second from my class, and everyone tried to take after me, they asked me how you do this or that, so everyone tried to make friends with me. My colleagues were Hungarian, only I and other three girls in our class were Jewish. The schoolmistress assigned me to tutor a girl who couldn’t hear well. And I tutored her and the girl passed the grade, because at Christmas she had failed the exams and it was then that the schoolmistress noticed that something was wrong. But I didn’t receive as much as an apple as a gift from her, and her parents were rich people in the village, they had an estate.
In middle school I enjoyed geography, French, I was the best in all the school at French. And I also liked mathematics. Of all the teachers I liked the French teacher. I liked the way she talked and she behaved nicely. And I enjoyed speaking a language that others didn’t know and that I liked very much. I had another very good teacher, who taught us physics only for a while, Mrs. Gabi; she also taught us mathematics and chemistry. I was the best in physics, I liked it very much. It is a wonder that I am not good at electricity nowadays, I only know few things. I had the key for the drawer where there were some physics objects, for the laboratory. Mrs. Gabi was so fond of me, she never had children. And sometimes, on Sundays, she would take me home with her in the after noon, for a meal. She cooked a better and more filling meal, and she always said: ‘Come on, I’ll take you home from the boarding school!’ she talked to me about many things, and I learnt a lot from her, about life, about how I should behave.
And then Emil came every day to Targu Secuiesc with the train to learn with me the lessons in Romanian, because I couldn’t learn anything as I didn’t understand anything in Romanian. He wasn’t employed yet at the time, because he wanted to take the entrance examination for university in Bucharest, so he learnt at home for a year, he thought he would get in. After that, Emil couldn’t study at the university, because racism had already begun, and numerus clausus [6] had already been enforced. I learnt Romanian from him until Christmas, I already had good grades in three months. I was a very good student, exceptional, I was the second in my class and I always received prizes.
My brothers went to school to Micu high school in Sfantu Gheorghe, where they stayed at the boarding school. My sister Livia also went to high school before me, she did three years of high school. There was only a primary school in Covasna, so I had to go to another town, to Targu Secuiesc, for high school, the middle school. I didn’t go to Sfantu Gheorghe because he boarding school in Targu Secuiesc was better, and my parents wanted me to eat as well as I could, because I was very thin. It was mostly my mother who insisted on me going there, she was afraid that I would starve. I was 10 years old when I went to high school – it was one year earlier than usual – and I didn’t know a word in Romanian. And the high school was a very good school and had a very good boarding school: it didn’t have a name, it was known as the high school for girls, and it was bilingual, students studied in Romanian and Hungarian.
I remember military parades in Romania on May 10th [5]. The biggest holiday was the king’s day, the proclamation of kingdom. I learnt patriotic songs back then, but I don’t know them anymore. As a pupil, I paraded, I even had an artistic program: each pupil who could do something was in the program: I did ballet dancing and I sang.
It wasn’t a Jewish school, it was a state school, which taught in Hungarian. The Groedl factory asked for a school to be set up there so that the children wouldn’t have to go a 2 km distance to the village. There weren’t means of transportation back then, there were no buses. And then the factory managed to have this school set up, for the children whose parents worked there, at the factory. And I repeated primary school for three times, from the first grade. Everything I heard for three years, I learnt, and when the teacher would ask a child something and he wouldn’t know the answer, I would raise my hand and say what he had to say, and I was only 5 years old at the time. I learnt very well in the first grade. I liked everything in primary school. And I learnt everything without knowing to read, only by listening.
My mother looked after me when I was little, there was no kindergarten where we lived. We lived near the train station and the kindergarten was 2 km away and I couldn’t go there. We lived near the train station because my father worked at the shipping of the merchandise at the Groedl factory. When I was 4 years old I ran away from home: I was bored, and I knew there was a village near the town and I wanted to get there. I liked to walk when I was little. So I started walking on that 2 km country road that went to the village, but I didn’t know why I was going there. And a Romanian peasant came with his cart from the opposite direction, and he saw that I was walking alone, that nobody accompanied me. I was walking and singing and I was doing just fine. It was spring, almost summer…then the peasant stopped the cart and asked me where I was going. But I couldn’t say where I was going, I just mimed that I was walking. Why was I walking? But I couldn’t say anything to him in Romanian, because he was Romanian. What is your name? Yes, I could tell him my name. My parents didn’t find me immediately because the peasant didn’t know where to look for my parents, because I only told him my name, but nothing more. The peasant announced the militia that he had found a child. And then the peasant took me home with him, and the militia looked for me. That’s how they found me and took me home. And then mother said that that couldn’t go on like that. Actually that’s why I went to school when I was 5 years old, even if school started when you were 7, so that I wouldn’t desert!
All our family fasted on Yom Kippur and we children fasted as well when we turned 10 years old. I know mother cooked humentaschen on Purim, but dressing up wasn’t popular in Covasna. We always celebrated Christmas as well. We received presents, we had a Christmas tree and under the tree we always had books, many books. We, the children, my brothers and my sisters, received many books, each of us for our level.
There was no synagogue in Covasna where we could go on Sabbath. So on the high holidays all the Jews in Covasna gathered in a room of the factory my father worked for, which was some sort of a club for them; and I know a Jew from Debrecen came, who knew the prayers and who led the ceremonies. He had no function in the community there, and unfortunately I don’t remember his name anymore.
There was no work done on Saturdays, or on Sundays as a matter of fact: not even the servant was allowed to work. My mother didn’t cook kosher food, but every time she got to Brasov, she bought kosher food from there.
My father knew some Hebrew I think, but my mother didn’t, she could only read. She learnt to read the prayers, but I think my father went to cheder as a child and he could understand it as well. They weren’t involved in the Jewish community in Covasna. My mother observed the tradition at home, although my father worked on Saturdays: she lit a candle on Sabbath, she recited the prayer.
In their everyday life my parents wore clothes that were modern at the time, but they observed the tradition at home and they went to the synagogue as well, when they were in a city that had a synagogue, like Budapest or Debrecen.
My mother was a well-read, cultured woman, she read books regularly. There weren’t many women as cultured as my mother, because my grandmother had been like that as well. My father read books as well. My father really enjoyed reading at home. He was the one who usually bought books. He always bought books for us, for example by Emile Zola, or ‘Egy magyar nabob’, ‘A koszivu ember fiai’, by Mor Jokai , or books by Kalman Mikszat . [Note: Mor Jokai (1825–1904) and Kalman Mikszath (1847–1910) Hungarian writers, the former is a representative of romanticism, the latter of realism in the Hungarian literature.] ‘This is for your age and this for your age…’, we always received books for reading, not for studying.
We had a servant, a girl, back then one couldn’t raise children without help. My poor mother, she couldn’t cope with everything alone.
Covasna was a spa resort, tourists were coming from all over and as a consequence the market was very expensive. Sometimes my father or someone else from the family – my elder sister Livia when she grew up – came to Brasov and went shopping for the necessary things here because they were cheaper. It was customary to do the shopping in Brasov.
The owner of the timber factory where my father worked was an Austrian baronet, Groedl, who was a Jew as well. Actually they were a family of baronets, they were a few brothers, and they owned the forests and the factories in Comandau and Covasna. And this baronet had a big factory there and many employees. At Comandau, the merchandise was brought from the forest and it was processed, timber was made from the cut trees. The factory in Covasna was for storage and selling of the merchandise, it was like a shipping station: the timber came as merchandise and from the sale point it was sent to different countries. It was a big factory, the biggest timber factory in all [today’s] Covasna county. My father only worked there, at the factory in Covasna. There weren’t typical occupations for Jews in town. All Jews worked in the factory, almost all of the employees were Jews.
There was a Jewish community in Covasna and there were Jews in the town, but they weren’t as they should be, they weren’t decent Jews. They were the kind of Jews people hate us for, with no character, I have to say that. I don’t know where they came from. They weren’t straight, honest. Those who were well off didn’t want to hear about other Jews. When there was a collection for a poor woman or a sick man, they never contributed with anything, they were mean people, I have to say that. I can’t say I felt anti-Semitism in Covasna because I lived among Jews, although we didn’t get along well with Jews either. My mother was a very honest and well brought up woman. I don’t want to say more, but there were some among them who were dishonest and my mother didn’t want to be associated with them. My father had colleagues in the office where he worked. And one of his colleagues, who later became director, was dishonest and stole as much as he could.
I was born in Covasna in 1920, my brother Otto in 1923 and Edit in 1926, in Covasna as well. Covasna has been a spa resort for as long as I know it; there was electricity and running water everywhere. The water was very good, you could take mineral water directly from the fountain. There used to be a carbonic acid factory, acid which was put in the mineral water and the sodas. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it did, I remember that. I lived there until I was 20 years old.
When my parents moved to Covasna, my maternal grandparents came to live with them there. My brother Francisc was born in Covasna in 1914, while my parents were in Covasna. Then my father was drafted in the army again and my mother was left alone with the children again, she only had her parents with her. And what was she to do, she had no relatives near by, there was no one. So she took refuge in Hungary, to her sister, Margareta, whose husband was an administrator on an estate, there was food, a good material situation, and she stayed there with the children for as long as World War I lasted. My grandparents went to their daughter Charlotte in Budapest. After the war, my mother was the first to come back to Covasna with her three children. My father returned some time after her, because I remember my mother used to tell me about a period when she was alone with the children in Covasna and they suffered from a terrible hunger, and lived from the mercy of others. My father had been taken prisoner at the end of the war, at Skopje and two other places, but I don’t know which they were.
My father was drafted for military service and then he was a soldier. He was drafted in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, as soon as the war started, and my mother stayed behind with three children in Kajanto. I am not sure what the events were back then, but I think my father returned during the war, closed down the factory because it was in ruin and he couldn’t recover any losses, and then he went to Covasna and became the director of the Groedl factory.
I don’t know when exactly, after 1910, my parents moved to Romania, to Kajanto, near Cluj-Napoca [a 12 km distance]. [Editor’s note: Transylvania and the territory Mrs. Gotterer refers to in 1910 belong to Austria-Hungary, only later in 1920 became part of Romania.] There was a brick and terracotta tiles factory, which was built by Armin, my father’s brother, who was an expert in construction materials and in timber: Armin handed over the factory, which sold terracotta stoves, to my father. The factory was on my father’s name; Armin remained in Debrecen. Of course the factory had workers employed. In Kajanto there is the biggest brick factory. In Cluj, at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, my father’s name, Solomon Lowi, is written in the books as the owner of the factory. My parents didn’t live in the city of Cluj, but in Kajanto, which was close; but they had a coach with horses, and somebody to drive it, and they went in the city very often. My sister, Livia, was born in Cluj in 1912. My mother didn’t tell me what the house in Kajanto was like, but she would have liked to stay there, in Cluj. They lived in Kajanto until the war [World War I].
My parents’ marriage wasn’t arranged like it was in those times, it was a love marriage; my father was a very handsome man. They got married in Debrecen, in the synagogue. I don’t know if they had chuppah, but they must have done as it is written in the law. At first they lived in Debrecen, but I don’t know for how long. From Debrecen they went to Karczag, but I don’t know what they did there, and from Karczag they moved back to Debrecen again. My mother might have gone to Karczag only to give birth: my elder brother, Emil, was born in Karczag. I don’t know anything about my parents living there. For as long as they were in Debrecen, my parents lived with my maternal grandparents.